Fantasy Football AI is based on Blood Bowl, a board game that is played on a 26x15 square board representing an American football field.
The game has perfect information, it is stochastic and it is turn-based with multiple actions performed by each player.
Two players play against each other in a 16 turns game, divided in two halves of 8 turns each, with the goal of scoring a touchdown in the opposing player endzone.
In every turn, a player may activate all his pieces on the board.
Normally, 11 pieces are at the disposal of a player, but the number may reduce during the game due to injuries suffered by the pieces.
In the activation, a piece on the board can perform numerous actions based on their status.
The piece can be moved by an amount of squares defined by its movement characteristic.
The piece can block an enemy piece in its tackling zone. The block consists in rolling one, two or three dices depending on the strength characteristic of the activated and enemy piece, as well as the number of supporting pieces the two players have.
A supporting piece is one that has the enemy piece in its tackling zone, without being in the tackling zone of any enemy pieces.
The outcome of the dice roll decides whether the enemy piece is pushed, the enemy or the player piece are going to the ground, meaning that they cannot interact with the enemy until the beginning of the owner's turn. When a player goes to the ground there is a chance that is removed from the board for the rest of the game or until a touchdown is scored, i.e. suffering an injury.
When a piece move outside an enemy tackling zone, it incurs the risk of going to the ground, with the possibility of being removed from the board as for a block.
The risk of going to the ground increases proportionally to the number of enemy tackling zones along the movement path.
An extremely important concept in the game, is the so called turnover.
When a piece fails a critical action, that results in going to the ground or losing the ball, the player's turn immediately ends and the new enemy turn starts.
More detail on the ruleset can be found in [1]}.
Moreover, the game allows for a number of re-rolls which can be used to modify an outcome and avoid a turnover.
